I'm working on a program that automatically creates downloadable archives of these forums. The 'automatically' part isn't finished yet, but you can already download the (partly manually created) archives of yesterday. You can keep them as personal backups or use them to read the forums while being offline. They are available at mcduck.nl/archief/forum.

Each post is in a separate text file. This means that for example the archive of the McDuck.nl forum contains tens of thousands of text files. Take into account that some computer programs might not be able to handle that.

Attention: Downloading and usage of the forum archives is on your own risk. Although they have been tested in MS Windows XP and in Ubuntu, there is a chance that they do damage somehow or other.

Months ago you asked me (by chat) to test such a "separate text file" backup system, and it took Windows XP two hours to delete all the unzipped files. On a brand-new computer.What have you done with this complaint? Offering people a file system that might "do damage somehow or other", sounds as if it's just the same file-structure as what you sent to me.I'd like to see you answer this before I get my computer system into trouble once again. Basically, you sent a virus (or data-bomb) that I had great difficulties to get rid of. Your advice at the time, to just step over to Linux, didn't sound very useful. I hope you understand my reluctance.

Have you tested the file system on a Windows machine yourself this time?

Daniel73 wrote:Months ago you asked me (by chat) to test such a "separate text file" backup system, and it took Windows XP two hours to delete all the unzipped files. On a brand-new computer.What have you done with this complaint?

I've tried to make sure that file and directory names use a right encoding now. In the version I sent to you, the problems might have been caused by weird characters that Windows doesn't like. Currently, all characters that could possibly be weird (non-ASCII, slashes, etc.) are replaced by an underscore (_).

I'm not 100% sure that the problems were caused by this. I only know that the current version works for me, in Windows XP and in Ubuntu linux.

Daniel73 wrote:Offering people a file system that might "do damage somehow or other", sounds as if it's just the same file-structure as what you sent to me.

The file structure is the same, but the file names are different. I think this structure is the best choice, as it is the most logical one and it can be used by computer programs to reconstruct the forums if neccessary. Operating systems should be able to handle it.

Daniel73 wrote:Your advice at the time, to just step over to Linux, didn't sound very useful.

I was just joking. The real advice I gave you was using a file removing program. I didn't expect and am sorry that the testing version caused problems.

Daniel73 wrote:Have you tested the file system on a Windows machine yourself this time?

Yes, I have tested extracting, reading and removing all three archives in Windows XP and in Ubuntu. It worked perfectly for me, apart from the little error I mentioned in the Downloads list. I think that is because Windows doesn't allow two directory names to be the same but in different case ('Donald Duck' is the same as 'donald duck'), and I'll fix that in the next archive. 7-Zip and WinZip are able to handle the error well, though.

You could also just download the archives and leave them un-extracted for now. Then it's just a backup for in case something happens at McDuck.nl's server. (You could send it to me then, assuming my own PC stopped working too, and I could check whether you've changed the archives with the MD5 checksum.)